I don’t know if you remember this from the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice In Wonderland. Instead of washing the dishes or cleaning up, the characters simply moved down to clean spots at their large tea table.
I am uncertain whether my youngest daughter even remembers this scene from the book, but she has taken it to heart! Because we are such a large family, we also have a long table. To avoid arguments and to separate the more contentious of the siblings, everyone has their assigned place at the table. This does nothing to deter my daughter. She begins her day at her own place with her first breakfast. Once she has spilled enough milk, yogurt etc. to make her own spot unusable, she simply moves to the next place down! If we are not paying attention, by the time she has had second breakfast, snack, elevenses and possibly more, she has worked her way down an entire side of the table, making a complete mess as she goes.
As frustrating as this is, I know she will eventually grow out of this behavior and become a mostly responsible person. In the Bible however, Jesus was far more concerned with a different type of cleaning, one that we do not simply grow out of or mature from.
Again, this goes back to the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus frequently found Himself surrounded by. They continually only thought about their appearance. Unfortunately, they neglected their inside, namely their hearts, motives and intentions. Jesus compared their behavior to only cleaning the outside of a cup or a dish, without washing the inside. He told them in no uncertain terms that they were full of greed and self-indulgence. In fact, they were not dissimilar to my five-year-old who does not care whether she is dirtying up someone’s place at the table as long as her own desires are met!
These people were in grave spiritual danger, but Jesus did tell them how they could change. He told them to first clean up the inside of their lives and He said the outside would follow. We all tend to get this backwards. We think we have to work so hard to clean ourselves up on the outside so that we will be “good people,” when all the time, if we would put Jesus first in our hearts the rest would follow.
So as I am teaching my little girl to clean up after herself and to respect other people, I am going to also teach her, (and remind myself) how important it is to be spiritually clean on the inside!
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.” Matthew 23:25-26
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